Crime and Policing Bill

Damien Egan Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 10th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Damien Egan (Bristol North East) (Lab)]

I am very happy to be able to speak and to add my support to this Bill, and I appreciate the depth and ambition of the measures that have been brought forward.

When I meet my local police officers in Bristol and South Gloucestershire, I see a committed group of men and women completely dedicated to public service, but I also see that morale is low. Police numbers in Avon and Somerset have fallen, with the number of PCSOs dropping from 424 in 2010 to 255 today. After 14 years of cuts, officers question if they are appreciated. For our police, I hope that this Bill is seen as a demonstration of the confidence that we have in them and the respect we have for the difficult job they do.

I welcome the steps taken to let police get on with their jobs, including searching premises where phones are geolocated, confiscating illegal road bikes and introducing respect orders, as well as lifting the £200 cap on when officers will investigate shoplifting. There are also the new protections for shop workers such as the women I have met working in Boots in Kingswood and the PDSA—People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals—charity shop in Kingswood, which are just two of the shops blighted day in and day out by shoplifters.

On a different aspect of the Bill, we have seen the struggles and confusion in relation to policing public order at protests. Protest is a cornerstone of our democracy, but we have seen examples of protests that have become hateful, have incited violence and have become violent. Fines for climbing on war memorials and banning face coverings will help maintain public order, and I hope the police know that they have our support to act when they see wrongdoing. As the Bill progresses, I would ask Ministers to consider how robust the exemptions are for face coverings, as they may be open to misuse. For example, the health exemptions could have very broad interpretations.

On knife crime, officers in my patch certainly welcome the changes, but they are concerned about how unscrupulous knife manufacturers could adapt to selling knives that, while technically legal, still glamorise violence. In the past year, I have got to know a woman called Hayley Ryall, the mother of Mikey Roynon from Kingswood, who was tragically killed at a birthday party when he was stabbed by three young men in June 2023. Mikey was a beautiful young man, and he was just 16 when he was killed. With the ongoing trials of serious violence reduction orders in Thames Valley, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Sussex coming to their conclusion this year, Hayley has asked me when a decision will be made on the wider roll-out of serious violence reduction orders and when that will take place.

All these measures will only have the full effect if we have the officers on our streets to police them. Avon and Somerset recently received a £27 million uplift in funding, and I look forward to seeing this money used for more recruitment and to support our existing officers. There is much to fix—we all know that—and these measures go a good way to putting the balance of power back towards law and order.

Oral Answers to Questions

Damien Egan Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Amanda Martin (Portsmouth North) (Lab)]

5. What steps her Department is taking to tackle criminal gangs facilitating small boat crossings.

[Damien Egan (Bristol North East) (Lab)]

16. What steps her Department is taking to tackle criminal gangs facilitating small boat crossings.

[Mr Speaker]

Can I ask the Home Secretary please to look at me occasionally? It would help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. There are many different threats to our border security, which is why we have set up the border security command to draw together the work of different agencies, including on dangerous drug smuggling and organised crime, bringing together Border Force, the National Crime Agency, the intelligence and security agencies and local police forces. The border security command’s first priority will be to deal with the dangerous boat crossings that are undermining security and putting lives at risk, but as part of its work it will be dealing with the wider threats to our borders as well.

[Damien Egan]

I thank the Home Secretary for her answer about the criminal gangs. People in Bristol North East also ask me about deterrence. What reassurance can I give them that this action is being backed up with measures to stop illegal working by people who do not have a right to work here?

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about how employers have exploited illegal migration. As a result, we set up a major programme through the summer, including raids, pursuing illegal working in different places across the country. We have also substantially increased our work on returns, including redeploying 1,000 additional staff to work on returns and enforcement, to make sure the rules are being properly respected and enforced. That has led to an increase of more than 20% in enforced returns this summer.

Assisted Dying

Damien Egan Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Westminster Hall

[Damien Egan (Kingswood) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Tonia Antoniazzi) for her introduction. I feel privileged to follow so many compelling and thoughtful contributions.

We do not have to speak to many people before we hear painful stories of the torturous and brutal deaths that people’s loved ones have had to endure, often through extreme pain. I always thought that I would be one of those people who said that a form of assisted death would not be for me or something I would encourage for loved ones. This weekend, I talked to a lot of people about this debate, and my nan—a very wise woman—shared the story of her mum, who died of breast cancer at 61 and had a very difficult death. That made me feel that what I thought before was naive. Yesterday, on a very different visit, a woman from a local “save our green spaces” group said to me that we do not treat our pets in the same way that we do people, and let them have such cruel deaths. I did not have an answer for that, which made me feel that surely we can do better.

As we move forward in this debate, I would like to add my voice to the call for us to exercise caution. With over 400 million people around the world living in countries and jurisdictions that have introduced a form of assisted dying, there is much to learn from. I do not yet know the ins and outs of parliamentary procedure, but it is something that needs considerable thought and time. On one extreme, I was taken aback by examples from the Netherlands of people ending their lives due to mental illness. I worry about assisted dying being seen as an alternative to palliative care, about people feeling like a burden on their families, and of course about coercion.

[Mrs Pauline Latham in the Chair]

However, I bring Members back to the example of Oregon, where legislation has existed for 27 years, and has not actually been extended. Assisted dying is limited with strict safeguards: people must have a terminal illness, life expectancy of less than six months, and there must be cooling-off periods. Interestingly, a third of people who start that route never take end-of-life drugs, but they are reassured that they have that choice, if needed. It would need interrogating, but in 2019, the executive director of Disability Rights Oregon said that they had not received a complaint about coercion of disabled people. It has come with very good palliative care, and more than 90% of those who died under Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act 1997 were enrolled in hospice care—